What’s in that “Eusebius book” I’m commissioning?

I’ve been reminded that the Eusebius project has been running so long that many people may not recall what it contains.

Eusebius wrote a work on Gospel Problems and their Solutions.  This covered disagreements at the start of the gospels, and at the ends.  The work is lost, but a substantial selection in abbreviated form was discovered by Angelo Mai in the 1820’s and chunks quoted verbatim appear everywhere in Greek medieval gospel commentaries.  In addition there are bits of it in Latin, Syriac, Arabic and Coptic translation.  No critical edition of all this has ever appeared, nor any translation into English.  A critical text and French translation of the Abbreviated Selection (ecloge in epitome) did appear last year from Claudio Zamagni, who is attacking the problem.

The book contains an English translation of all these, with minimal notes.  It won’t contain a commentary — a huge task for what is already a lengthy book — but it will contain the original text, facing the translation.  This will be reprinted from wherever the best text is, and will include the Sources Chretiennes text (but not notes) from the recent edition by Claudio Zamagni.

The idea is to make this largely forgotten work as widely available as possible.  So I — or rather my company — shall sell printed copies initially, especially to libraries.  Once that drops off, the translation (but obviously not the text, because I don’t own all of it) will be made available online, perhaps under some open source license.  The earnings from the sales will make it possible for me to commission another translation of some untranslated text.